another excellent xkcd comic

If you’re a regular Blogging.la reader you’ve seen some of our Blogging (in) LA posts by now. We’ve tried to be fair, covering some of our favorites like Weho Daily and the perhaps regrettably named Eastsider LA, as well as at least one that we wish might be different. We’ve interviewed the bloggers responsible for L.A. Can’t Drive and Green LA Girl. We’ve done a round-up of photo blogs and touched on food, real estate, and public service blogs.

Of course, the smattering of blogs we’ve covered over the past two weeks represent not even an iceberg tip of the sites devoted to LA, and we plan to keep highlighting one or two of our favorite and not-so-favorite LA blogs weekly. Drop a comment or write to one of us if you have a site you’d like to have us check out.

Twice-Seared Duck from Playa (photography by kevinEats)

In the lovely Blogging (in) LA series thus far, there has been a wide variety of news worthy, photographically stunning, and extremely useful blogs covered, but I’m here to bring in a little sweet & savory into the mix.  Food.

Foodies and Food Bloggers in Los Angeles are making a huge impact in the landscape of both culinary invention as well as the venues in which food is both served and enjoyed.  They are at the forefront of defining a new set of guidelines on which a restaurants success or failure can be measured, and perhaps one of the most prolific (& one of my personal favorites) food bloggers is kevinEats.  (http://www.kevineats.com/)

If you haven’t ever read his reviews, you are in for an undeniable treat.  A well versed photographer who is able to capture the mouthwatering essence of high end dining, kevinEats‘s knowledge of chefs du jour as well as their master counterparts is astounding, and his posts which generally pre-empt the debut of new restaurants to hit the LA scene exquisitely summarize  the experience and tantalize his readers to follow in his footsteps.  If there’s a new chef in town, you can bet that kevinEats will be there, hobnobbing with the staff, part-taking in tasting menus designed to make us wish we had better paying jobs and in general giving us a glimpse into which restaurants SHOULD be added to our never-ending bucket list.

But, reader be warned… this is not a blog to be consumed on an empty stomach, or you’ll find yourself angry that you’re not sitting in front of a plate of teriyaki foie gras or squid ink pasta.  Well, you might still be angry on a full stomach, but it won’t be quite as painful.

[This post is part of our Blogging (in) LA series]

There are many that call themselves daily, but only a few truly do it daily. Several are every few days, even a few are closer to monthly updates. Other than a glitch last week when when blogger was down a few days the regulars never missed a beat. Having tried this once and failed I have to admire the motivation and tenacity to post something daily, that in itself is no small feat.

My hands down favorite of the daily photos out there is the Pasadena Daily Photo. Why? Simply because since 2008 blogger Petrea Burchard hasn’t missed a day. Not only are her images well done, many cross the border into the fine art side of photography. Of course she has her share of cute puppies, news/documentary and slice of life stuff but her best work comes on Monday. Monday is “Zen Monday” when she posts an image that is left for discussion and interpretation by the viewer and they leave their thoughts in the comment section. Monday is my favorite day of the week thanks to Zen Monday.

Here is the run down of the other daily photo blogs in the LA Area that I follow with a short comment describing them.

• Pasadena Daily Photo…she rocks what else can I add to what I already said?
• The Sky is Big in Pasadena…nice guy documenting what he sees and does each day in Pasadena.  A few pics of his family and co-workers which don’t mean much to anyone who doesn’t know him. Never missed a day since he started in ’07.
• Altadena Daily Photo…updates very infrequently but does nice quality work, especially enjoy the scanner stuff.
• Gem City Images…an interesting daily documentary, with a few arty bits of my little corner of LA (aka Monrovia Daily Photo).
• Covina Daily Photo…updates daily, always very well done arty photos, if not a bit overly ‘shopped.
• Temple City Daily Photo…he puts up daily but I visit only weekly, not much interesting going on there often.
• Palos Verdes Daily Photo…does it daily, and usually has some interesting images, some shopped, some just very well shot.
• Daily Photo LA…doesn’t do it daily, and content isn’t just LA, but rather rambles about So Cal.  Decent documentary images for the most part, nothing really spectacular.

I probably missed a couple so feel free to shout out your favorite daily photo blog in the city in the comments.  Certainly I can stand to add a few more interesting blogs to my list of daily reading.

This post is one of many in the Blogging (in)LA series we are running the next few weeks.

Street Art is a pretty big topic in Los Angeles, and it’s been a hot topic right here on Blogging.la in the not too distant past. There’s no question that the epicenter of Los Angeles street art sites is 50mm Los Angeles. For the last 15 years some of the most talented folks in the LA scene have wasted countless hours on the message boards there. But sometimes you just want to see the art. And that is where Melrose & Fairfax has been killing it. Since the arrival of Known Gallery in the actual Melrose & Fairfax district, that area has become quite the hot spot in itself so a site named after that really need to deliver, and the dude(s?) behind M+F certainly deliver.

The site is like a firehose of pics, documenting every angle os street are in the city. Spray paint to wheat paste, posters to stickers, stencils to every damn thing else you can think of. If it’s happening on the streets in LA there’s likely a post about it there. While there is certainly news and discussion there, the site really excels at providing a constant visual stream – new pics all day every day. You can pop over there any time and see new stuff – sometimes new stuff by people you know, sometimes new stuff by new people making their first attempts on the streets. In a few minutes you can get a great idea of what’s new around town visually right this minute. Anytime I see new work that catches my eye that’s the first place I look for more info. Not to mention with so many other sites being text heavy, the commitment to photos here is a welcome distraction. And of course, you can find them on twitter as well (though sadly that’s just a feed of posts from the site).

[This post is part of our Blogging (in) LA series]

Omar Bárcena's Los Angeles photo used through Creative Commons license

Hello there b.la readers,

Those of you who stop by regularly know what Blogging.la is about. We blog here because we love LA and we want to share what we love about it with you all. We don’t pretend to be comprehensive or “objective” and we aren’t paid. We’re just Angelinos with various passions and proclivities (even obsessions). We like to write about our favorite LA moments or upcoming events that we think sound interesting or news about vegan restaurants or bicycling or film noir or street art or elections or or or … fill in the blank.

But we know we’re not the only game in town. We were the first group blog about LA–we’ve been blogging in LA since 2003–and we’ve seen a lot of other sites and bloggers come and go.  Most of us who write for b.la read a lot of other sites devoted to Los Angeles. At one of our last meet-ups we decided it would be a good idea to share some of our favorite LA-based sites with you. So for the next two weeks, we’ll be posting every day about our LA compadres–from the ridiculous to the sublime. As with so much of what we cover here, we are simply writing about what we think is noteworthy (both for its virtues and faults); we aren’t attempting to be encyclopedic about our approach. That said, after the first couple of weeks of daily posts, we plan to continue the series indefinitely with weekly posts about other LA sites. We aren’t promising anything, but If you have a favorite you’d like us to cover, of course, you should write us and let us know.

Enjoy!

Click here for posts in this series.

That crazy 99 Cent Chef is at it again.  With some Jacaranda blooming  just a tad earlier than usual he celebrates their arrival with a quick video tour and ends it all with a recipe for eggplant hummus.  If you dig purple food this will be for  you.  You can follow more of his adventures in and around LA in the 99 cent stores creating more fun food on his Blog.

One of the great things about writing for blogging.la is you get to go to writers’ meetups at some of LA’s classic eateries.

Today we met at Musso and Frank (a.k.a. my house), where Benevolent Dictator Jason hosted us for flannel cakes, bloody Mary’s with lots of fresh horseradish, and eggs Benedict.

Huzzah!

(and yeah, Will did do an entry about this – sorta – way back in ‘Ought Six)

Congratulations are in order for outgoing Curbed Los Angeles editor Dakota Smith.

Dakota took over the LA edition of the popular real estate and development blog when it was barely in the terrible 2′s. After a 4-year run, she heads to the Valley to report for the Daily News.

We look forward to reading her take on the always amusing 818. Maybe she can help us get the trains rolling.

Hey blogging.la community! Wanted to quickly introduce myself… in blogging.la’s wonderful decision to add on a slew of new bloggers, I somehow made it through the hurdles and have been warmly welcomed into the community. So who is this newbie blogger you ask? Well, even if you didn’t I’m still going to tell you. I’m a native Los Angelino, such a rarity it seems, who had a normal childhood growing up in the suburbs of West Hollywood, traipsed to New York for a quick jaunt, and then missing the warm So-Cali sun returned back to the homeland. Like all good LA children, I’ve made my nest in the “Industry” but fashion myself as a foodie & blogger on the side. If your taste buds teeter on the side of adventure, you’d probably enjoy my collection of deliciously baffling cupcakes on my blog, Cake & Heels. When I’m not baking, reading scripts or planning massive beer pong tournaments, I’ve decided that I’m dedicating that remaining 5% of free time on my pie chart of life to writing HERE, on blogging.la. So seriously, THANKS for having me and hopefully this is the beginning of a long and beautiful relationship!

Grilled Cheese Invitational

So let’s get down to the oh-so-gooey and cheesy heart of this post… preferably layered between slices of freshly baked bread. It’s that time of the year, the 2nd 8th Annual Grilled Cheese Invitational! This Saturday, April 23rd, Los Angeles Center Studios plays host to what has grown into a massive annual tradition. Over 300 amateur & professional competitors battle for grilled cheese glory in 4 different categories: Love, American Style || The Missionary Position || The Kama Sutra || The Honey Pot. And the best part? YOU can be the judge.

In addition to the usual crowd of foodies, fans and cheese heads, you can expect some fierce competition out of the likes of Top Chef Masters: Eric Greenspan from The Foundry, Food & Wine’s Best New Chef of 2011: Ricardo Zarate from Mo-Chica and the soon to be hit Picca, the amazing Walter Manzke formerly of Bastide, Church & State and currently at Le Saint Amour, Eric Samaniego from my Sunday night favorite Comme Ca, Micah Fields who loves to please at the Standard Downtown and Nyesha Arrington from the gorgeous Cache on Main Street. Plus the fabulous Alie & Georgia of McNuggetini Cocktail Fame will be on hand mixing up magical libations during the event!

The 2nd 8th Annual Grilled Cheese Invitational
Saturday April 23rd || 11AM – 6PM
Los Angeles Center Studios
1201 West Fifth Street
Los Angeles, CA 90017
$12 Online, $15 at the Door, $17 Judging Pass
www.grilledcheeseinvitational.com

I don’t know wether to laugh or cry at this but we’ve hit our 15,000th post published mark this week! The post in question was from frazgo titled Buy clothes that fit… mildly nsfw. The post stirred up a little dust on the merits of blogging in general but all in all good fun.

I can’t believe we’ve made it this far. There have been some incredible writers through our doors over the past 7+ years and we’re going to be opening up the floor for more people next week so if you want to join in on the Granddaddy of LA blogs get your links handy and I’ll be posting details on Monday on how you can become one of the crew.

Here’s to the next 15k!

If you follow the Militant Angeleno blog which is all about L.A. from the POV of an anonymous local you’ll enjoy this video. If you don’t follow do so.  Best April 1 vid on the webs I have found yet. Awesomeness.

The motley crew of bloggers at the 2008 Picnic.

Come rain, quake or fallout the picnic will go forward Saturday at Farnsworth Park in Altadena.  This will be something like the 5th Bloggers Picnic since we started this in 2007.  Its open to all bloggers, blog readers, fans and stalkers who would like to attend.  We’ve even had bloggers from the LA area appear at prior events so it truly is open to everyone.

Timothy Rutt of the Altadena Blog took over organizing a few years ago.  I don’t have a complete list of everyone that will be there, but I can tell you that West Coast Grrlie Blather, Pasadena PIO and the Pasadena Daily Photo will be there to get things started.  The gawds of blogging overruled kid’s sports gawds this weekend so even I can make it for a while on Saturday morning (I’m bringing “Browned Butter Brownies” as my contribution).

This is true potluck style.  Bring your favorite dish to share.  Blog it to share with others if you can.

DEETS: Saturday March 19, 11AM-5PM, General Charles S Farnsworth Park, Altadena CA.  MAP HERE.

It starts with a call from Ford if you’re Matt Farah from Redondo Beach who runs the Los Angeles based “The Smoking Tire”. For others like Donna Ruko in the Focus Rally America it was answering a post in a trade paper promising a reality show based on a cross country road trip.  For those that answered the call and got chosen its been an adventure unlike anything they’ve ever done before.

Four Los Angelenos have been on that adventure for 3 weeks now, due to end sometime in the next couple of weeks (my personal guess is somewhere here in LA). They are Matt Farah (Redondo Beach) and Brittany Boddington (Northridge) making up Team Red. Team Yellow also representing LA is Donna Ruko (Los Angeles) and Bryn Dresher (West Hollywood).

All of them are dialed into the social networking scene to a degree. The most notable is Matt Farah of the red team who owns The Smoking Tire the blog and on twitter as @thesmokingtire. His rally partner Brittany Boddington set up a tumblr blog just before this race and is on twitter as @britboddington. Donna Ruko has her own site and can be followed on twitter at @donnaruko. The only one without a significant web presence is Bryn. Complete bios are at their Rally America pages for Team Red and Team Yellow.

As racers in the Rally America part of their challenges involves their followers. Team Red currently has nearly double the amount of followers of its nearest competitors (8049) and Team Yellow is mid pack (3790). Why is this important? Well as a team follower you can interact with them while they are driving and help them solve challenges. As an example, today the followers had to find objects starting with specific letters and upload them to a facebook page, with check in at the checkpoint based on your completion time. Sort of an interactive Amazing Race.

Their days are planned out by the production team, but they have no idea what is in store for them when they wake up every day. Their days are so busy with challenges, checkpoint and jump start that they have no time to do touristy stuff, and if they do have some down time they all have to agree on what they do and do it together. For Donna she says she has seen so much of this country this trip that she is looking to going back to many of the places and being a tourist and just check out what she missed.

When I talked with them this morning they had plenty of good things to say about this adventure, but they all missed LA to a degree. For Matt, Brittany and Bryn its the homey things like their own bed, their cats and friends here in the city. For Donna its hikes up behind the Hollywood sign that she misses the most. Regardless, their adventures will be over soon and they’ll be back to life in LA and its adventures.

When we travel we all miss something from home, these guys have been on the road 25 days already and told me what they missed about LA. What do you miss most about LA when you travel? Just curious.

Screen grab with the permission of Focus Rally America

Not that many months ago Patch, AOL’s news group came to LA with the promise of hyper local news reporting. I have to admit I had high hopes for them to be digging into local news that the bigger outlets don’t tackle as it just wouldn’t generate the ratings. Not all the bloggers held the same high hopes, some certainly have taken exception to the presence of “McBlog”.

Here in the SGV two bloggers in particular have focused on what Patch is doing in their communities. Sierra Madre Tattler and Monrovia City Watch believe that Patch reporters don’t report accurately or in depth.  Allegations are also made of censored comments and out right banning from comments.

On the first topic Sierra Madre Tattler is more adamant about the shortcomings of patch. John Crawford has numerous posts up on Tattler regarding the short comings of the legal understanding and accuracy of reporting. He has openly challenged the stories on their controversial water rate hikes. He and many believe that procedurally the city didn’t follow the law regarding hearing notices etc.,. When challenged Sierra Madre Patch ultimately stood behind the report even though Sierra Tattler believes they gave them all that was needed for a retraction. (As a side bar the Howard Jarvis folks are looking into the rate issue and may sue over how it was done).

He summed up Patch in a recent email “he reporting on Patch is lame at best, disinformation at worst. The Sierra Madre version of America’s 800 site McBlog has resorted to telling the worst kinds of lies in what is a rather pathetic attempt to curry favor with City Hall.” He also said in a blog post “Sierra Madre has long been beset by media that thinks people here are only interested in reading hollow press releases and brain numbing boosterism. Material coming from the same small handful of people, over and over again.”  More on his thoughts HERE.

My emails to Sierra Madre Patch editor John Stevens for comment on the allegations made by Sierra Madre were not responded to.

Here in Monrovia, Monrovia City Watch takes exception with the depth and accuracy as well, but is more concerned with censorship of comments. Recently there was an unfortunate loss of life in a fire and comments went off topic into the effectiveness and compensation of the local firefighters. In it Cyrus posted a link to a youtube video that was, according to Nathan McIntire of Monrovia Patch, flagged by 3 locals as “inappropriate”.

After that Cyrus made several additional comments regarding the “censor” of his comment. He has stated to me that those comments were all removed as well as those made by Nathan to remove the entire chain of comments so no one could read into what had transpired.

Nathan commented on Cyrus’ allegations in an email to me:

As far as the depth of our coverage, I think it speaks for itself. We cover Monrovia on a daily basis and are grateful to have been embraced by nearly everyone in the community, including Mr. Kemp (who was a very active user), before this unfortunate incident.

Regarding Mr. Kemp’s charge that he was “censored” on our site: the only comment of his that was ever removed–before our regional editor removed his recent threat to spam our site–was removed by other users. It was a link to a video deriding firefighters (in vulgar language) that was posted to a story about a local woman dying in a fire. Three users flagged the post as inappropriate, and it was automatically removed by our system.

Cyrus reponds that it is pure “bullshit”, that he was banned because he got into “Nathan’s face over the depth and accuracy of the fire reporting”. He agrees that the video had what some would consider vulgar language, but he believes that the link alone could have been deleted. If they felt his including his blog URL in the comment was spam they shouldn’t have included a spot to put ones URL in the comment in the first place. Banning him outright was just “Bullshit and hiding behind the TOS was equally so”.  (It appears that flagging results in automatic removal of comments by the Patch system based on Nathan’s comments).

Bloggers like Cyrus and John get it that comments aren’t always nice or for the thin skinned. Certainly life isn’t always nice-nice, but is the AOL TOS for Patch just a little rigid?  (I get it they are a big corporation and can set their own terms of service).  Anyone else running into similar with Patch?

(screen grab of the patch sign-in courtesy of Cyrus Kemp and it does get bigger with a click)

Pictured above leading a charge westward toward downtown across the 4th Street Viaduct during CycLAvia last October is Highland Park-based blogger Waltarrrr. I find this image I captured of him on that glorious day rather iconic in that for the past 4.5 years he’s been trumpeting to greater Los Angeles all about the present and past of the multifaceted communities of Northeast Los Angeles. And I present it to you today so that you can join me in saying goodbye not to him, but rather to his indispensable 90042 blog, whose hibernation he announced yesterday:

What I can say is this blog is going to sleep for a while. The weekly posts just won’t be there anymore. Instead, I plan to focus on my first love, Art. I’m a painter by trade. As a byproduct of putting my efforts into writing and researching this blog, I haven’t actually made a painting in some time. In my studio sits a pile of blank canvases awaiting my attention. This year I resolved to start painting rather than writing, to start sketching rather than tweeting. I’m a craftsperson, a maker. At this juncture I need to create tangible objects more than web posts.

It has been a fun trip, but the time has come to put the blog to rest. Thanks for sharing the ride.

I’ve had the pleasure of his company on numerous bike rides and various long walks. The favorite story I like to tell about him happened in October 2008 when I’d planned to walk the entire length of Western Avenue from Griffith Park to the land’s end. Waltarrrr was very much looking forward to it, but as the day approached a conflict arose that prevented him from joining us. So he did the entire thing himself a week earlier than us, adding untold distance by venturing off on explorations down countless side streets until he was forced to stop around Torrance. Set on completing the journey, he returned the next day to where he’d turned back by the 405 Freeway and walked the rest of the way to the sea. His Flickr photoset of the two-day trek is here.

While I’m going to miss 90042 immensely, I’m also going to hope there’s ultimately a parallel to draw between his amazing journey and his blogging: he knew when to quit but came back to where he left off and kept going.